


(can't promise) you won't die alone

by swu



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, also brief mention of the Duncans but not really, featuring the origins of Project Leda, this is also sort of a Helena backstory - so warnings for all that entails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 12:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2772605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swu/pseuds/swu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What's the cliche—when you die, your entire life flashes before your eyes? Well, this the life of Maggie Chen, the life that Beth Childs took.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(can't promise) you won't die alone

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings: self-harm, abuse, child abuse, blood, death**
>
>> _[I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8We0FVflGaU) wish that I had known in that first minute we met,_   
> _the unpayable debt that I owed you._
>> 
>> _'Cause you'd been abused by that bone that refused you,_   
> _and you hired me to make up for that._

I wasn’t supposed to die this way.

At first I thought I’d be remembered, then I thought I’d be saved. I didn’t think I would bleed out on the pavement in some alleyway. I didn’t think I’d die running.

I didn’t always think this much about death. I guess I assumed I would die in a hospital room or a nursing home somewhere, old and feeble, after a boring and ordinary, but satisfying, life. Maybe I’d have something to show for it. Children, grandchildren. I didn’t think I’d be scared of death. I didn’t think I’d be so unfinished.

But lately I’ve been thinking about death all the time. For a while, I thought I’d be venerated. Immortalized. I thought my obituary would be a full page in the Times, thought that years later children would talk about how I was one of the group of brilliant minds who changed the nature of humanity forever. I assumed they’d remember me, that  _someone_  would remember me, or at least remember what I did.

Later on that didn’t seem as important, the remembrance thing. Or any sort of legacy. It wasn’t about that anymore. I already had that, I was part of something greater than anything I ever could have dreamed. And that was the problem. We overreached,  _I_  overreached. We weren’t meant to push that far, that hard, that fast. We were going to pay for our hubris, eventually. Well, I guess this is my payment.

But still, I didn’t think it would come to this. I thought I’d been fixing my mistakes. That’s what we were doing, wasn’t it, wasn’t that what all this was about? I thought that, in my dying breath, I’d be… forgiven? Absolved? Engulfed in warm light, some heavenly embrace, maybe, and welcomed—despite everything I’d done. But apparently blood doesn’t wash off your hands so easily.

Oh, God.

Weren’t you supposed to be a benevolent God? Weren’t you supposed to forgive our sins? I realized them, I did, and I tried— I tried to set them right. I  _gave_  myself to you because I wanted,  _all_  I wanted, was forgiveness. If I could go back I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have touched— oh, but it was so  _tempting_. It was  _right there_ , for us and us alone. Only  _we_  were smart enough, clever enough, to grab it. It almost seemed like you  _wanted_  us to, like you were daring us. Like it was a challenge. A game. But I should have known. I should have seen it. Should have realized what we were really doing. I know I should have. Should have, should have. Shouldn’t have.

Wow, what great final thoughts to have. Just a laundry list of regrets. Funny thing about growing up without God—in your last moments, I guess it’s hard not to revert to that original state. I just want to see my mother again. And I hated my mother.

What’s going to happen to me now?

No one will remember me.

That wasn’t the point.

I never thought this would be it.

How did I end up here? Dead on the pavement with a cop—a monster of my own creation—standing over me, gun in hand?

You know she’s going to get away with it, too. She’s a cop. And I’m no one. I was someone, but now I’m not. I’m a ghost. She killed me and she’s going to get away with it.

Well, not in the end. Sometimes I have to remind myself of this. She’s going to get what’s coming for her. We all have to face our judgement.

Right?

My parents didn’t believe in judgement. They didn’t believe in anything bigger than what you could see and prove and explain with logic and science. Anything beyond that was impractical, after all—if you couldn’t see it or touch it or measure it, how could it affect you?—so why waste your time thinking about it?

They’d moved here from China in the 50s for college. They’d gotten out before the the Mao Era began in earnest, before the universities were closed down and everyone in my generation would grow up working on farms. They'd gotten out because they were  _just_  smart enough, but mostly because they were incredibly lucky. They came over with forty dollars in their pockets, suitcases packed with everything, down to pots and pans and bedding. Back then it still seemed like a voyage to the New World, like they were leaving everything behind so that their kids (kid, just me) could have a better future in this new land, full of opportunity. And they never missed a chance to remind me of that.

I was born a few years later. They named me Margaret, after the nurse who looked after my mother in the delivery room. I guess they hadn't really thought about it beforehand.

I thought about names a lot. I'd named each of our clones before they'd even been born. I knew their parents were going to name them, but I did it anyway. I loved them, even when they were barely cells in a dish. I loved them when they were barely an idea in our heads, a daydream.

Now I don’t remember which one was which. Once they got assigned to their surrogates and adoptive parents and families and lives, once they grew up and out of our reach, somehow along the way I lost track.

When Helena killed her first, I tried to remember which one it was. I stopped after the one. After they died, I couldn’t remember what I'd named them when I created them. Pretty soon there won’t be anyone left at all who'll be able to remember what they were then, at the beginning. When I watched them die, I told myself I didn't remember loving them.

At university I studied Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. For a brief period I wanted to be a surgeon. I wanted to hold people's hearts in the palm of my hand, to pull them back from the brink of death. Should have seen it then, shouldn't I? Should have reigned it in, probably.

I wanted to prove something, I guess. The classes I took in college were full of the prep school elite and WASP-y white boys, with old money, old power, and born with the entitlement to wield it. I guess I always wanted to join the boys’ club. To infiltrate them, and prove that a little Asian girl, a daughter of immigrants who was never meant to be part of their world, could. I guess part of me always wanted that, even later on.

I did end up going to med school, but for a while I almost thought I wouldn't. I knew being a doctor in a hospital would never satisfy me. It wouldn’t be enough. I  _wanted_  a lot back then. I thought there were certain things I deserved. My parents came all this way for a reason, after all.

I’ve wanted a lot recently, too, but different things now. These final months have been a marathon, a death race, and I just wanted to reach the end. And by then, it was all just scrambling. I was so afraid and I didn’t even know of what anymore. I wasn’t so much afraid of God or judgement, because I’d made my peace with it, or at least I thought I had. I was afraid of time. Of not being able to fix everything in time, of not being able to stop what I had helped set into motion.

No. That’s not true. That was what I told myself, that I was afraid for the world, and afraid of what would happen if I failed. But that is a lie.

I was afraid for myself. I was afraid it was my fault, I was afraid of drowning in guilt, I was afraid of just how much responsibility it was, if I ever stopped to really think about it. I was afraid of how harshly I would be punished, so I tried to punish myself before God could mete it out, but I knew what was coming had to be worse.

But back in college and all through med school none of this crossed my mind. My world was awash in bright lights, and it blinded me. I wanted more, all the time. I couldn’t  _just_  be a doctor, because who ever changed the world one single person at a time? It was too slow. I was impatient.

I dropped out of my surgical residency program after my first year. It was devastating, actually. It was the first time I’d ever given up on anything, failed anything, in my entire life. I’d always taken so much pride in finishing what I’d started, so quitting—even then, that didn’t seem like the right choice, a choice I had spent months carefully considering, even though I had. It didn’t seem like a choice at all. It seemed like I was taking the easy way out. There was always that little voice inside me telling me that I just couldn’t cut it. That I was weak and dropped out because I was scared. I’m pretty sure back then it was my father’s voice but it became my own soon enough.

I went back to work at a lab that I'd interned at as an undergrad. We grew organs in jars, built them from scratch out of stem cells. Seeing a heart start beating, a heart that was there, solid and real, sitting in front of me where once there was nothing—that was the closest to God I'd ever felt. For hours, I'd watch them thrum, lit from below in the dark incubator, and it felt like a prayer inside me when I still had no idea how to pray.

We were going to start human trials soon—my PI thought we could change how transplants were done forever. This was the most exciting time in his career, in any scientist's career. And I was starting to feel trapped.

That was it?  _That_  was his big dream? Yes, technically, it would be a medical marvel. It would save thousands of lives each year. But was that really it? We could make something living where there had been nothing, and the endgame was to use that to perform the same transplants we've been doing for decades? There was nothing revolutionary about that. We were stuck in the same box, the same rut, that scientists and doctors had lived in for years; we were just refurbishing it so maybe no one would notice we hadn't actually moved anywhere at all.

Each day at work started to feel like more of a technical and physical challenge than an intellectual one. All the wonder was gone; all the thinking and dreaming had already been done. The work lost its connection to humanity for me. I lost my humanity. I was just at the end of an assembly line, tweaking the product for consumer release.

That's when the Dyad recruited me.

They told me they were starting up a project that was military-contracted, top secret. And just like that, I was sold. They said “top secret” and I heard “elite.” This was my chance. I was being chosen.

Those intervening years were the best years of my life. I was so naive then, so foolish. I was living the greatest dream imaginable. We were going to change everything.

But that didn’t last. It was never meant to.

It turns out this is something of a pattern for me. My life has been a cycle that constantly repeats itself.

The project began to smother me, slowly, gradually. Not my ambition, like before, but other things within me. I didn’t notice it at first—I didn’t even know those parts of me existed. It took me even longer to understand what exactly it was; it wasn’t until several years after the clones were born that I began to see things clearly.

It started small. First I couldn’t sleep. Our work in the lab was growing rather routine, no longer driven by the adrenaline and ambition that fueled us leading up to the creation. We’d receive data from monitors, run tests, continue routine experiments on cell cultures and genome engineering for the next batch. The next batch, like they were cookies in the oven. I’d come home from work utterly spent, but I could never fall asleep. I’d lie awake in bed for hours, just staring at the ceiling, searching. For what, I didn’t know.

There were others who began to feel it then, too, though we each reacted in different ways. That was our flaw by default, perhaps. Our individual exceptionalism, our stubbornness—the very traits that had once drawn us to this project and brought us together were what eventually drove us apart. We all watched the clones, the  _girls_ , from afar, as they grew from infants into fully fledged children,  _human beings_. And we knew we had made a terrible mistake.

They were doomed from the start. We never even gave them a chance.

We doled out a punishment that was not ours to give.

The Duncans were the first among us to begin whispering. Of course. Because of Rachel. Because they had one in their  _home_ , in their family. A constant reminder of what we’d done. And they loved her in spite of it. They loved her even more because of it. They believed they’d done right by her because she was here, wasn’t she? And she was loved. They wouldn’t be a  _family_  if it hadn't been for what we’d done.

Yet even beneath their professed happiness, they knew the truth of it. They began to implore for reconsideration of the future of the Project. No more batches. No further experiments. Just monitor what we’d already created. But unfortunately that call was no longer theirs to make.

There were rumblings that they planned to take matters into their own hands, to sabotage the project and flee. I heard that they went through with it. I heard what happened to them afterward, too. They’d done what they needed to do. They had achieved their end.

But by that time, I'd already left the Project. You see, what the Duncans were planning—it wasn’t enough for me. Their vision was clouded by that little girl living in their home and in their hearts, their  _daughter_. We never should have allowed that. No personal entanglements, we’d said from the start. They were our  _experiment._  How could we have allowed that?

But anyway, it wasn’t enough for me to simply salt the earth and walk away, content that no clones could ever be created in the future. It wasn’t enough. We had  _already_  sinned, and we couldn’t turn our backs on that sin now. I couldn’t just flee with a child in my arms, content to live out the rest of my life playing some farcical game of house. We had already made these girls. It was our duty, our burden, to unmake them.

I turned to the only place I could think of, a place I’d never even considered in the previous thirty years of my life. It was the only place that might truly be able to comprehend the gravity of our wrongdoing. Of my guilt.

Did you know that when I was younger, I could barely bring myself to set foot in a house of worship because I felt that I would burst into flame? Somehow, my mere presence there would be enough to alert God of his mistake. I knew I was a sinner before I had ever really sinned. Before I knew what sin truly was.

It still seems so bizarre to me, if I try to look at myself from the outside, that I chose to live out the final years of my life with these people. Years ago, I'd have thought them crazy, or just plain stupid. But it turns out they've known things all along that the rest of us, in our arrogance, had forgotten.

I'm not sure if I believe the way the rest of them do, even after all this time. It might have been too late for me to truly give myself over to them. But I did give myself over to Him. There is still no doubt in my mind of my belief in God, in his presence, in his domain, and in our unforgivable hubris of thinking we could usurp it.

And so I found myself somehow, incongruously, bonded to Tomas and his ilk, if not by true commonality of belief then at least by one single shared and all-encompassing purpose. A mission.

For years, that mission was a single word, a name: Helena.

Amelia hid her well. It took us almost a decade to find her, but Tomas always knew we would. God has eyes everywhere.

Helena was twelve when we took her away from that place. The nuns there, they hated her. Called her an abomination. The work of the Devil.

She very well may be an abomination, but the work was mine. And even then, the moment we saw her, we knew we’d found what we’d been looking for. As they practically shoved her out the door, they prattled off harrowing tales of the horrors of what she’d done when she was with them. What she’d done  _to_  them.

I knew right then that she was different than all the others.

She had a purpose. We were going to show it to her.

But even when it's handed to you, even if you were  _born_ with it, purpose isn't something that is so easily found.

The first time I caught her with the blade, I was shocked. Horrified, almost. I stopped her. Tomas had given her the knife, I think. I think he left it out for her to find. I don’t know anymore. I taught her to clean her wounds and stitch herself back together again. And after a while, when it became clear that she couldn’t stop, that she  _needed_ this, I helped her find her wings. I carved out the places she couldn’t reach, because the reach of her arm shouldn’t determine the span of her wings. 

It grew surprisingly normal for us. I’d sit with her and her shape her haphazard slashes into intricate designs. They were beautiful. She was beautiful. At first, when she was younger, she’d cling to me afterward. We never spoke. We didn’t need to. I knew every cell in her body. I could read each twitch of a muscle or curve of her back.

As I held her, her head notched beneath my chin, I'd feel each breath. I'd feel how they started, hitched, catching in her throat. I'd feel them slow. I'd feel them begin to match mine. And soon our breaths would come as one. We _were_ one, grasping each other so desperately because neither of us had anyone else in the world.

And I held her and held her, and her blood ran down my arms, and I never wanted to let her go. I wanted to erase all of her pain and the weight on her shoulders; I wanted to wipe everything away, everything I'd done to her and all the time in between. I wanted to erase it all, until there was nothing left. No pain, no damnation. Until she was free to simply float away. Until she was nothing but that dream I once had, an idea. Ideas have infinite potential. An idea cannot be doomed to die. An idea cannot cry, bleeding in my arms.

She was that idea once. Helena. She wasn't always Helena. I press my forehead into her hair, as if somehow she could tell me. What was your name, Helena? What did I call you when I still had the right to love you? Who were you before I made you this way?

But she doesn't answer. She can't. The idea is gone, swallowed by time. I cannot love her. I cannot love. A monster doesn't know how.

Tomas was a different story, a different beast entirely. He was the one who beat her. Mostly. But I did, too. You start to lose control when you live holed up for so long.

When I was a child, I could never understand how you could harm another person so profoundly,  _physically_  harm them, and then still claim to love them with all your heart. I said I did. All the time. I nodded, and hugged, and forgave, and taught myself not to flinch. But I never  _really_  understood. I didn’t realize how long I’d been carrying that with me until Helena. Until I had a child of my own. And then I understood completely.

Every time I hit her, later that night, after she fell asleep, I’d hit myself. I wanted to feel it. For every time Tomas struck her, I’d double it for myself—one for his strike, and one as punishment. For not stopping it.

And each time, I’d hear my own voice, a memory, too many separate memories, and it would say, “ _You can hit yourself all you want, but you can’t replicate that fear. I am a **child** , and you cannot strike that same terror into your own heart. It's not possible. You will never know._” But I had to try. And I  _did_ know. And perhaps, for that sheer, primal terror—perhaps overwhelming guilt and shame was repatriation enough. Perhaps that was what the voice, that child’s voice, had never truly understood before.

But that voice was right. It was not enough, it would never be enough. I needed more. One night I asked Tomas to brand my flesh. Though the request didn't quite shock him, I'm sure he wasn't expecting it. Not all of us are marked. It wasn't a requirement. That first night he'd suggested a tattoo instead, but that seemed… too easy. Helena had bled to cleanse herself of her sins. Even this seemed cowardly and small compared to how much she’d given.

For years we trained Helena to kill. To kill the clones. Tomas, obviously, thought they were abominations. It almost seemed like bloodlust at times, his conviction that they all needed to die. And I guess I agreed, as well, but for me that was never all it was. I knew they were going to get sick. I knew they were going to die slow and painful deaths.  _I_  had done that to them. And I was going to save them from that misery. I was saving them in more ways than one.

We waited, Helena, Tomas and I. For fifteen years, living in secret, in hiding. Training Helena. Preparing her. Preparing ourselves. Or at least I was.

Fifteen years is a long time. Helena was ready long before then. Tomas wanted to start as soon as he'd taught her to master the rifle, but I insisted we wait. And he listened, grudgingly, sometimes raging, because he needed me, after all, to find them.

And so we waited. And I watched the clones from afar. We waited for over a decade, until the first ones started showing symptoms.

I never took any pleasure in this. I should never have given them life, but they were alive nonetheless. I wanted them to live, for as long as they could. All I wanted was for them not to see the specter of death as it came for them. We trained Helena to be precise, quick, and unfailingly lethal. No one should die running.

But I couldn't have known that they would find each other. It had taken us years to find Helena. But, somehow, they did find each other. And they knew. They saw the hand of God reaching down for them from the heavens, and they ran.

No one should die running. But I had to finish what I started. So we followed, trying to salvage the mess I'd made even of this.

But even if everything _had_ gone according to my plan, there would always have to be an end. One who would see the hand of God because the hand of God had been her. Helena. The first and the last, the beginning and the end. Helena was mine.

It was my job to kill her, in the end. My responsibility. I brought her into this world unwillingly, against the will of God. I was supposed to be the one to free her from it, in His name. Who would give her that mercy but me?

When I first hit the ground, blood spilling, I didn’t think of God. I thought of my mother, briefly, but mostly I thought of Helena. My creation. My abomination. My child.

Your original sin was mine.

Always cycles, always repeating. A girl functionally abandoned by her parents abandons her creations. And abandons her child—not by choice. By circumstance, always because of external forces outside of one's own control. But that doesn't matter, not in the slightest. It's still abandonment. It's still the worst thing you can do to a child. Aside, perhaps, from bringing them into this horrible world, where they were never even meant to exist.

A girl becomes everything she promised herself she would never be, only now suddenly everything she resented makes complete sense. She is part of that cycle. She keeps it turning.

The cycle never ends, and she is never finished.

And she can’t save you from it anymore. You’re stuck here, on this wheel, and I am no longer able to set you free.

So this is it for me, I guess. My vision blurs. I won’t bother working out the damage done to my flesh—I know I’m done. I count each feeble beat of my heart. I feel each shallow breath, feel them begin to hitch and catch in my throat. I feel them slow. All I feel is asphalt against my ribs.

The last thing I see is Elizabeth Childs standing over my body. But the thing is, when she looks down at me, all I can see is you. The sun is shining from behind your head, your face wreathed in light, and you have never looked more beautiful.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry.

**Author's Note:**

> > _In the darkness I will meet my creators_   
> _And they will all agree, that I’m a suffocator_
>> 
>> _I’m sorry if I smothered[you](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnkzvAXWV-0)_


End file.
